436HP wav files - an issue?

[daveharpe]

Interesting issue with the 436hp WAV files. They PLAY fine in VLC and Windows Media, but when you try to import them into certain audio applications (mostly Adobe), they give a "Bad Header" error and won't import. WAV files from my HP-1 import into these applications just fine.

Any idea what the change might be? I'm using Adobe CS5.5 so it's not the most current version, but it's also not that old either.

Dave

 

[RF23]

Some of the meta data in the wav files produced by the 436 are different from the HP-1.

If you use this player:

HomePatrol Wav Player Page

You will see it displays the same kind of info that the HP-1 displays when it is used to playback the wav files it has produced. However, if you playback the 436 produced wav files a couple of fields are not populated with the expected info but instead have a "@" symbol instead.

This may be the source of the problem with Adobe, but it is just a guess on my part.

 

[daveharpe]

Might be. I've never had an audio file not open in After Effects, Premiere, Media Converter, etc. Also iTunes doesn't see the title and artist information, either...so I'm guessing it's truly a bad header. UPMan - any comments?

 

[Jay911]

If you look at the header of the sound file compared to one from a HomePatrol, using something like Notepad++, there are slight differences. I don't have any recordings to look at right now but IIRC the x36 files report RIFF4 vs HP1s showing RIFF1, or something like that.

It would appear that some programs can't read the files at all, and some can read them partially, and some read them just fine. For me, VLC will play the audio; MediaMonkey doesn't play audio but does show some (but not all) of the metadata fields; and Audacity won't even load them (even if I try "import raw" as suggested by the help dialogs in Audacity).

Hopefully this is a bad header or perhaps a header format for files typically found only in Japan? It's curious that VLC will play it, unless it just skips over all the metadata and looks for the 'data' chunk.

 

[Ghstwolf62]

VLC plays anything.

 

[daveharpe]

Some software (VLC, others) are very forgiving when it comes to media files. VLC will play just about anything - although it has no metadata display for the 436 files as you mention. Internet Explorer shows the fields when you navigate to the folder on your desktop so it's seeing some of the metadata. But I've never seen a single valid file format that Adobe Media Encoder couldn't parse - until now. Definitely feels like a bug.

 

[daveharpe]

VLC fix for WAV file problem

FYI I just realized I had not shared my solution to this problem with the group. To revisit - the WAV files created by your 436/536 don't work with many editing programs - most notably Soundbooth from Adobe - so if you want to composite your recordings it can get a bit tricky.

This solution uses VLC and is a simple batch file to iterate through a directory full of WAV files and convert them to MP3s. Batch commands were cobbled together from various scripts I found online. You should know something about MSDOS batch files before using it because it's a very basic script. Download the attachment and change the extension to .BAT, then run the script.

Before using this script you should have the following directories already created:
C:\Temp\vlcbatch\src
C:\Temp\vlcbatch\src\converted
...and of course you need VLC installed. The script assumes VLC is installed in the default directory.

Your WAV files should be in the "src" directory. When you're done there will be mp3's in the "converted" directory. There is a line in the script I commented out which would move the originals to the trash. If you want that functionality uncomment the line.

Again no warranty - I found the script somewhere online and tweaked it. I'm still running Windows 7 - it probably won't work with Windows 10. You could do lots to make it better - add variables, drag-and-drop, etc. but I just needed something simple.

 

[EricCottrell]

Hello,

I tried BWF MetaEdit. It complained about the bad header, and did not show anything. I looked at the file in a hex editor, and discovered the keyword field, IKEY, is specified as having 20 bytes, but actually has 24 bytes. I changed the size and BWF MetaEdit read all the fields. It did complain about the creation date, ICRD, not being formatted correctly, It is 20151208074147 instead of 2015-12-08 07:41:47.

It appears some software assume lengths for the fields instead of reading the actual length values. The HP Wave Player program will still not display all the fields on the fixed Wave file.

73 Eric